Bangladesh has a comprehensive portfolio of public safety net interventions to assist the poor through transfer. Many of these public interventions fail to reach the poorest of the poor—the ultra-poor. Moreover, transfer payments help the poor over the short term but do not by themselves trigger sustainable income growth for the ultra-poor. These are the challenges that drove the BRAC to initiate an experimental program in 2002 called “Challenging the Frontiers of Poverty Reduction: Targeting the Ultra-Poor (CFPR/TUP)”, with the vision of enhancing economic and social capabilities of the ultra-poor households in Bangladesh in a manner that could be sustained by the program participants. While several studies have looked into the components of the CFPR program and its impacts, this study uses rigorous, state-of-the-art techniques to assess the impact of the program on welfare outcomes of its beneficiaries. The study uses a difference-in-differences method and propensity score matching method for quantitative evaluation of the impact of the CFPR. The study compares its findings of the short- and the long-term impacts of the CFPR program on food consumption with the findings of another study that used the same data set. It then concludes that the quantitative estimates show average impacts of the CFPR program, but they do not explain how and why the program had (or did not have) impacts on individual households; there can be no presumption that all program participants benefited or benefited equally. However, five qualitative case studies were presented to help explain the impact pathway.
Authors: Ahmed, Akhter U; Rabbani, Mehnaz; Sulaiman, Munshi; Das, Narayan C
Type: Monograph
Year: 2009
